Techweek triples attendance, plans LA sibling

(Crain's) — Techweek, the Chicago tech confab that wound up its second run on Tuesday, will be shorter but bigger next year. And it will have a sibling in Los Angeles.

The conference nearly tripled attendance to more than 6,000 from a little over 2,000 last year, says Iain Shovlin, a venture investor and chairman of the for-profit group behind Techweek.

He hopes to hit the 10,000 mark next year. But the conference will be three days, instead of five, Thursday through Saturday next year, June 20-22. This year's show ran Friday-Tuesday.

"It's a reaction to what attendees and partners told us," said Mr. Shovlin, chairman of GuildCapital, a Chicago-based private investment fund.

He says Techweek will put on a conference in Los Angeles in 2013, but he didn't disclose the dates.

"Chicago and Los Angeles are similar in being a little underserved from a tech perspective," he said. "There's no need for a Techweek in San Francisco. Our first priority is to make Chicago a tremendous experience. We'll only expand elsewhere when we've done a good job at the other two (cities)."

The conference launched last year as a way to get the city's tech community together and "promote the innovation ecoystem" in Chicago. It launched at the Merchandise Mart, which has emerged as a hub for the city's high-tech scene. The format is part panel discussions with tech-company CEOs, a hiring fair, a startup competition and company expo.